by Jo Mazelis
There are 1,500 children in this school and of the thirty in this English class none know a single thing of any significance about yew trees.
The school has been built on top of a hill in the centre of a housing estate. In winter there is nothing to buffer the icy wind that comes scouring over the playing fields and black tarmac netball courts. Nothing to protect the girls’ legs in their knee-high white socks, yet there they are; shivering though each break and lunch hour. Breathing in the yellow stink of sulphur when the wind comes from the industrial east.
In milder weather these girls perform their ancient game of levitation, not knowing where it has come from; nor that it was first mentioned by the diarist, Pepys in 1665.
She looks ill, she is ill, she looks dead, she is dead.
One girl lies down on a low wall, five others surround her. They must not giggle, must not break the spell. When the chanting voices have each repeated the spell, they lift the girl on high using just the tips of two fingers each.
They know about this, but they do not know yew trees.
The school bell rings upon the teacher’s silence. The poem, its ‘cold and planetary’ secrets and its author (who gassed herself six years ago) are all eclipsed.
Quietly the children push back their chairs and, gathering their belongings, they file in silence from the room. The teacher does not look up until the last pupil has gone.
She opens her eyes to thirty empty chairs and desks. And on the desks thirty rectangles of paper, every word unread.
FALLEN APPLES
The old woman walked down to the bottom of the garden again. She gazed up at the apple tree and shook her head gently as if her old skull – almost empty now of memories – was moved by the slight breeze. The green apples that hung above her head were still tight and hard and small. They reminded her of something, but she couldn’t think what. She moved away from the tree and walked towards the house again, then stopped.
Nancy watched the old woman from the bathroom window. Minutes before she had flung it wide open even though her sister Martha had said to keep it closed. Nancy had wrapped her wet hair up in a towel and wore only a bra and jeans. Her skin was damp and greasy with bath oil. It was too hot to keep the window tightly closed. Too hot to wear many clothes.
The old woman in the garden next door, Nancy thought, walked like an insect, there was something light and mechanical about her movements. Even the old woman herself looked puzzled about this, as if she could not understand why she walked in this strange way, with her legs and hands plucking at the air as if they had just been freed from gravity. She was tiny, and fleshless. The bones and veins showed through her hands in a way that reminded Nancy of an anatomical diagram.
The old woman looked at the house, upstairs at the window she saw a young girl with her hair in a towel looking down on her. She stopped walking and stared hard. It troubled her that she could not quite remember whom this person was that she was staring at. She had an uneasy sense that it was her younger self up there in the bathroom. She had done that one day surely – stood by the open window after her bath and then he had seen her from the garden and called up at her and asked her to stay where she was.
Except that she had been naked. He had run into the house to fetch his camera and she had waited obediently. Later he had asked her to remove the towel from her head and then he’d photographed her long wet hair as it clung in glossy waves to her freckled naked back. Then he had photographed her leaning over the sink with one knee bent slightly. But perhaps she wasn’t remembering right, though she remembered the pictures of herself emerging in the white enamel dishes, the strange red light in the darkroom and the indelible smell of the chemicals.
The old woman and the girl stood in their respective places watching each other.
Now it occurred to her that perhaps the girl at the window was her mama. A very young version of her mama – which meant that she herself must be only six or seven years old. Had she done something naughty? She was suddenly very anxious about this. Would she be punished? Would Mama cry as she had cried after the glass vase made by the Frenchman was broken?
Nancy saw these changing emotions flicker over the old woman’s face. It was like watching a TV screen with the sound down and a bad signal. The old woman’s hair was frazzled and grey and seemed to spring from her head like a halo of wire wool. Nancy had watched the old woman brushing it one day. Someone had put one of the dining chairs on the lawn under the washing line and the old woman had sat there in the pink quilted dressing gown she always wore, jerkily moving the brush over her head but not really making a good job of brushing it.
Martha had told her that there were no mirrors in the ground floor flat where the old woman lived – that the old woman had smashed all of them and wasn’t allowed any more, but no one could explain why this was, except to say that mirrors frightened the woman.
If she were that old, Nancy thought, she would not want to see her reflection. She never wanted to grow old.
The old woman continued to gaze up at Nancy as if she were waiting for something. Nancy smiled and slowly raised her hand and moved it back and forth in an approximation of a wave. She wasn’t even sure if the old woman could see her, but she wanted to be kind at that moment, to show that she was friendly.
The sky was pale china blue. It had rained in the night and the air had that steamy claustrophobic dampness about it that would burn off as the sun rose. At eleven o’clock Nancy was due to meet Sam near the old hospital. They would go for a walk – perhaps along the beach or through the park. They would walk holding hands and every now and then they would stop and kiss. Sam spoke with a soft low voice and a slight accent, he was twenty-three and Nancy had told him she was eighteen, when really she was still four months away from her sixteenth birthday. He’d told her he had come as a child from one of those Eastern European countries whose name had now changed. There had been a war, but he would not talk about it. His parents had fled to the West and now he had fled his parents. He lived in his car mostly. Worked sometimes as a washer-up in hotels. The police were looking for him. Sometimes he stole things, but only just enough to get by. Nancy was in love. She had known him three days. She planned to run away with him. If he asked her to.
The old woman saw the girl at the window wave. Goodbye, she thought, goodbye. Must I go now? Should I wave at Mama even though I don’t want to go to school and leave her?
Or perhaps the girl was not waving goodbye, but hello. She is waving hello because I’ve returned from somewhere – but where? And how long was I gone?
Or she is waving me away. Yes, that is it, I do not belong in this garden and yet I do not think I can climb the high brick wall to escape. I have been naughty and Mama will punish me.
Anxiety rose in the old woman. It was terrible, this sense of something wrong, something broken or lost. Her breath came in little sighed gasps – oh, oh, oh – much too quiet for the girl at the window to hear. The old woman found herself turning away from the house. It was time to go down to the apple tree again.
Nancy waited until the old woman had returned to the apple tree, then she pulled shut the frosted window and turned the latch. She removed the damp towel and threw back her head so that her wet hair landed with a cool slap on her naked back.
No make-up, not even mascara. No perfume or deodorant. He had said he didn’t like it. But she was afraid of smelling bad. Yesterday she had washed her armpits three times, once in the public toilets near the law courts, once in a pub toilet and once in the stream that ran through the wooded area of the park.
Sam talked a lot about philosophy and politics. Sometimes he reminded her of a priest, a kind of modern day visionary. Everything about the world was bad and wrong, he said. We have gone down the wrong path; we are lost.
She wished he would tell her about the war in his country, about his family fleeing. He had experienced at firsthand things she had only seen on the TV or in the papers. This gave his words and ideas gravitas. He
peeled the world like an egg, sneered at it. Showed her that inside it was quite rotten. If he asked her, she would run away with him, would do anything for him.
The old woman looked up at the apples. Am I Eve? she thought.
Then she had one of those rare lucid memories. He had taken a photo of her as she sat at the polished table in the old dining room. She had to take her clothes off and sit with a pile of books on the chair so that her breasts were level with the table. He’d put a line of apples across the edge and her breasts were meant to join this parade of round green fruit. It was meant to look surreal, but neither he nor she had liked the photo in the end. I am trying too hard, he said, it should be natural, spontaneous.
The old woman repositioned her feet and reached up as if about to pluck one of the fruits from the tree. She turned towards the house and gazed at the long path that wove through the garden. She had expected to see him standing there, his head and shoulders hidden beneath the black hunched cloth, his eyes replaced by the silvery glint of the camera lens.
In a book someone had called her his muse. Mama said he’d turned her into a whore and then he’d disowned her.
But there was no one standing in the garden with her. The apples were too high to reach. She slowly lowered her arm and wondered what she was doing there. The apples were not ready to be picked. They were small and hard and sour. Had she done something wrong? She had not meant to.
Nancy told Martha she was going for a walk.
Again? Martha had said.
Nancy didn’t answer. She’d taken a bottle of red wine from the rack in the dining room. She didn’t care if Martha discovered this later, but didn’t want her to find out now. She had meant to take the corkscrew too, but Martha was in the kitchen chopping onions so it was impossible. She hung around in the kitchen for a little while, hoping that Martha would go out to put washing on the line, or disappear upstairs to the bathroom. But all Martha did was chop onion after onion. For soup, probably. Nancy didn’t like soup, especially not onion soup.
The old woman was still down by the apple tree. Nancy stared at her through the lace curtain that hung over the kitchen window. She did not pull the curtain to one side, but gazed directly through it liking the way it turned the world pale and hazy.
-What do you think she’s doing down there? Nancy asked.
Martha glanced in the direction of the window; her eyes were pink and streaming.
-Oh, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her?
Nancy missed the note of sarcasm in Martha’s voice.
-Really? Do you think I should?
-Yeah, said Martha. I’m sure it’ll all make sense then.
-Oh, Nancy said, understanding the sarcasm at last; hating Martha for her bitter tongue. If Sam asked her, she would definitely run away with him. He’d talked about buying a van. They could live in a van.
-So, are you meeting someone? Martha asked. Having a rendezvous with a secret lover?
There it was – the nasty ironic tone again.
-Yeah, that’s right and we’re going to run away together and live in a van and have babies and love each other forever.
-Hah! Martha made a scoffing noise. Dream on.
Nancy scowled at Martha’s back, mouthed a curse before turning again to the window. The old woman had raised her hand as if reaching for an apple, then held it there a moment before she turned to look towards the house. Expectation, then a look of puzzled disappointment passed over her face, followed by an expression of almost tangible sadness.
Maybe Nancy would ask her why she kept going down to the apple tree. Maybe the old woman was just waiting for someone to ask. Maybe she had a thousand stories to tell and no one to listen.
-I’m going now, Nancy said to Martha’s back.
Martha did not speak, just shrugged her shoulders as if shaking something off.
Nancy had a sense that it would always be like this, that Martha would chop onions for eternity and the old woman would be stuck forever in that place under the apple tree. Nancy could go away for a hundred years and on her return it would still be like this.
Nancy picked up her bag; the weight of the filched wine bottle gave her great satisfaction. She slammed the front door hard on her way out. The loud noise had a pleasant angry finality about it. If she felt like it, if he asked her, she’d leave with him today, never go back.
The old woman looked up at the window where she had seen the young woman, but she wasn’t there anymore. The old woman remembered her mother crying again.
-If you leave don’t come back, she’d said.
But then she had come back and it was her mother who had gone.
And he was gone too, the man with the camera.
She looked at the apples hanging on the tree again. Still not ripe. But once again she pretended to reach for them. She held the pose for as long as she could although her arm was shaking slightly with the effort of it. She was waiting for the sound of the camera shutter that would release her from the spell.
She heard a distant thud and feeling a sense of relief she lowered her trembling arm, then turned smiling in the direction of the empty path.
He’s hurried off to develop the glass plate, she thought, and remembered the darkroom – how the plain white paper was tilted to and fro in the clear liquid of the tray until the image began to emerge. At first you couldn’t see what the picture was. Then the pale grey unreadable shadows gradually deepened until at last she saw herself as he had seen her – a creature who seemed to be both like and unlike herself.
She turned in the direction of the old house again and began walking towards it.
Behind her, the tree with its twisted branches and pale emerald leaves and unripe fruit stood as if waiting. Its shadow on the grass was as intricate and still as a photograph. A breeze shook the weighty branches causing them to creak and dryly rattle. At the sound she stopped and turned. He’d been there by the tree a moment ago; he’d reached up and caught a branch, plucked an apple and given it to her. She looked at her hands.
Empty.
BIOLOGY, 1969
Miss Monica MacKay was an English teacher and as such she was possessed of a febrile imagination. Last night, just before bed she had been marking first year essays on the Medieval Mystery Plays which the children had illustrated with the goriest representations of blood and devils she had ever seen. This had tainted her dreams and now on waking, she was trying to think of how it would have been to live in those dark times. How on earth did we survive? And become so numerous, she wondered. We must be like ants – rub a few out and the colony will still survive.
She knew that they suffered, did not believe that some human beings felt more than others, and were more sensitive to both ends of the spectrum of pain and pleasure, as had once been believed. But some human beings certainly showed no evidence of analytical thought; they just gave way to animal instinct and dropped children as casually as they dropped litter.
She was a teacher, so she knew.
When, as a young and idealistic woman, she’d imagined her future pupils, it was her own childhood self she saw; polite, eager to please, hungry for knowledge, full of awe for grown-ups (especially teachers), neat and sweet-smelling. She was aware that ignorance and poverty existed, but these could be overcome, had been all but overcome.
She was lingering in bed, delaying the moment when she would rise and, in dressing gown and slippers, make her way downstairs to the shared bathroom on the first floor. She could not dally too long, she knew, for then her co-tenants in the lodging house, and particularly Mr Peacock, would beat her to the bathroom, throwing her entire day off kilter. Because of this she set her alarm for 5.30 each morning and was bathed and dressed and out of the house by seven.
But lately she’d increasingly grown to dread work.
‘Why should I let the toad…’ went through her head as she padded along the corridor. Philip Larkin. Hardly a poet the rabble could understand. His language was simple enough, but some of his co
ncepts might be misinterpreted. It was no good explaining that the poem ‘Toads’ was not an invitation to revolution and anarchy and bunking off school – or as they said here ‘mitching’.
She put the plug in the bath and turned on both taps. Checked for a third time that the door was locked and the keyhole covered with a towel, then pulled off her long cotton nightie and dipped one virginal toe in the water. She knelt in three inches of water and sponged herself all over thoroughly, being careful not to wet her hair.
Today she would be teaching 3U, then 1E, then 2E, then she had a free period before lunch. The afternoon was solid; first a very small A level class who were doing Chaucer, then a class of fourteen year olds who, while they were remedial, seemed to enjoy listening to her read Stig of the Dump. The last class was 5D, O level English Language; today’s subject, comprehension, using the short passage from Lord of the Flies, where Piggy’s glasses are broken.
‘Toads and pigs and flies,’ she thought as she sprinkled Bronnley’s English Fern talcum powder between her toes. She determined to set her mind on higher matters and begin her day by challenging 3U with some contemporary poetry.
She closed the front door carefully behind her, pleased to find that this late October day greeted her with a clear blue sky and no wind. As usual she glanced back at a house two doors away from her own; Mr Kingsley Amis had once lived there, a lecturer at the university and a published author no less. Not that she had ever met him, except for that one time when he was leaving Mrs Ferguson’s, the sweet and tobacco shop, just as she was entering and there had been a sort of tussle of shuffling and to-ing and fro-ing and apologies. It had been nine o’clock on a Saturday morning and he smelled strongly of whisky and tobacco. From the night before, she assumed, though one never knew. The Amis family had moved out of The Grove eight years before, but she so longed for them to return, and so regretted never properly introducing herself, that she always looked wistfully at their house, willing herself back in time or them geographically shifted.